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One of the main reasons why organizations fail to realize the full potential of their investment in IT teams is misalignment between technical and business objectives. Engineering needs to know explicitly how their work fits in with the business’ broader goals and how they can judge whether what their work has an impact or not. To that end, organizations should identify and track the right key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be leveraged across the entire company. It goes without saying that these KPIs should align with business goals,...

As continuous integration and continuous deployment/delivery become everyday terms in software development and the DevOps world, it’s useful to define what they mean and clarify what each concept includes (and doesn’t).While the word “continuous” evokes the image of software that is updated with changes coming down the development pipeline around-the-clock, this is not the case. What it typically does mean is that changes are pushed frequently, usually every twenty-...

Last week I wrote a blog that defined and analyzed differences between the two predominant end-user monitoring techniques leveraged in the market today: Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Monitoring.I ended that post with a list of benefits provided by synthetic monitoring tools. This week I want to detail some of the shortcomings of using a "synthetic-only" approach and discuss how leveraging synthetic monitoring coupled with RUM is the most effective and holistic monitoring practice.Synthetic DeficienciesLast week, I detail...

At Rigor we’re always looking for technologies that will help improve our app, so when we started developing new reporting tools, we saw a great opportunity to give our front-end an upgrade with AngularJS. AngularJS is a framework developed by Google that makes creating interactive applications a breeze, and has the added benefit of integrating well with Ruby on Rails (our back-end framework).There are a lot of resources out there to help merge Angular and Rails, but we were disappointed to find that most of these resources are dependent...

Recently at Rigor Engineering we’ve started an initiative to increase visibility into our team. We wanted a way to display our KPIs (key performance indicators) for all to see. We created an engineering dashboard using a Raspberry Pi, Dashing, and Heroku.Dashing is an open source Ruby + CoffeeScript framework created by the team at Shopify for creating dashboards. There are many pre-made widgets already available, and custom widgets are easily built to consume data from APIs.We knew it would look great on the 50” wall-mounted TV...

A few months ago, we moved some of our queuing system for Rigor monitoring checks from delayed jobs to Amazon SQS. We did this to create a more service-oriented architecture that could better handle the growth of our monitoring. We also wanted to do this so we could have a hosted queue system that we didn’t have to manage, and for the most part, SQS was the answer.One big advantage of using SQS is the integration with Amazon Cloud Watch alarms, which we used to alert on different metrics of the queue, such as number of checks that are que...